Scholars have suggested that William Styron's Nathan in Sophie's Choice is insane or depraved—a character whose motivations lack rationality at best and are unambiguously evil at worst. Elie Wiesel, ...the author of the famous Holocaust memoir Night, has been very critical of Styron's novel. Ironically, by using the Yiddish version of Wiesel's memoir Night, it is possible to demonstrate that Nathan's behavior is more “logical” than scholars have previously understood. This approach offers us a new way of reading and interpreting Styron's novel by clarifying how Nathan's character functions within a well-established tradition of sociopolitical outrage about racial oppression, which is best exemplified in James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, a text that Styron strategically references in Sophie's Choice.
Uses twentieth-century fiction to demonstrate that the modern state was founded primarily on a Christian supersessionist theology rather than a secular ideology.
Before the 1970s, there were only a few acclaimed biographical novels. But starting in the 1980s, there was a veritable explosion of this genre of fiction, leading to the publication of spectacular ...biographical novels about figures as varied as Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Marilyn Monroe, just to mention a notable few. This publication frenzy culminated in 1999 when two biographical novels (Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Cunningham's novel won the award. In The American Biographical Novel, Michael Lackey charts the shifts in intellectual history that made the biographical novel acceptable to the literary establishment and popular with the general reading public. More specifically, Lackey clarifies the origin and evolution of this genre of fiction, specifies the kind of 'truth' it communicates, provides a framework for identifying how this genre uniquely engages the political, and demonstrates how it gives readers new access to history.
From the Nuremberg Trials to the present, there has been a tendency to overlook or dismiss Nazi claims to be Christian, and this is the case because scholars have used a secularization framework for ...understanding the Nazis and a transcendental-signifier approach to Christianity. True Christianity, the argument goes, has its roots in Judaism. Because Hitler and the Nazis denied the Jewish roots of Christianity, they were not really Christian. In this essay, I demonstrate how the dominant approach led the Nuremberg Tribunal to overlook crucial religious evidence from Streicher's newspaper,Der Stürmer, which would have strengthened its case against him. Moreover, I demonstrate that this same approach has led contemporary scholars to overlook the degree to which a specific version of Christianity motivated the Nazis to commit their horrid crimes against the Jews.
Abstract
Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after a historical figure, and since the 1990s it has become one of the most dominant literary forms. This is surprising because many ...prominent scholars, critics, and writers have criticized and even condemned it. This essay hypothesizes that postmodern theories of truth and concomitant transformations in reader sensibilities partly account for the legitimization and now dominance of biofiction. The essay analyzes a 1968 literary debate among Ralph Ellison, William Styron, and Robert Penn Warren, which on the surface concerned the uses of history in literature. But because it happened just one year after the publication of Styron’s controversial novel about Nat Turner, the debate ended up focusing primarily on the nature and value of biofiction. By analyzing the discussion in relation to contemporary formulations about and theorizations of biofiction, this essay illustrates why the forum represents a turning point in literary history, resulting in the decline of a traditional type of literary symbol and the rise of a more anchored and empirical symbol—that is, the type of symbol found in biofiction.
As a literary form, biofiction started to dominate in the 1990s, and over the last ten years, biofiction studies has surged dramatically. While scholars acknowledge that there were some important ...biofictions in the nineteenth century, the form first started to catch fire in the early twentieth century, especially among German writers who emigrated to the United States during the Nazi era. Klaus Mann, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Franz Werfel, Bruno Frank, and Bertolt Brecht are only a few who published noteworthy biofictions, but it was Lion Feuchtwanger who had perhaps the biggest impact, with the 1925 publication of Jud Süß, a biographical novel about the famous court Jew. This novel was a best-seller, which, in part, contributed to the massive surge in the publication of biofictions during the 1930s. But there are some serious concerns revolving around the work, which became most obvious after the release of Veit Harlan's 1940 film Jud Süß. By analyzing the novel and film in relation to the Nazis' anti-Semitic political agenda, I clarify why Feuchtwanger's novel not only failed tragically to accomplish what it set out to do, but also contributed significantly to an agenda that it sought to resist and debunk. This essay focuses primarily on Feuchtwanger's novel in order to clarify what biofiction is, how it uniquely functions and signifies, and some of the potential problems with the genre.
